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What's Wrong with [[Fundamentalism]]? - Part I

William [[Butler ]] Yeats, this arch-[[conservative]], was [[right ]] in is diagnosis of the XXth century, when he wrote: "...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best [[lack ]] all conviction, while the worst / are [[full ]] of passionate intensity." (<i>The Second Coming</i>, 1920). The key to his diagnosis is contained in the phrase "ceremony of innocence," which is to be taken in the precise [[sense ]] of Edith Wharton's "age of innocence": Newton's wife, the "innocent" the title refers to, was not a naïve believer in her husband's fidelity - she knew well of his passionate [[love ]] for Countess Olenska, she just politely ignored it and staged the [[belief ]] in his fidelity... In one of the [[Marx ]] brothers' [[films]], [[Groucho Marx]], when caught in a lie, answers angrily: "Whom do you believe, your eyes or my [[words]]?"<br><br>

This apparently absurd [[logic ]] renders perfectly the functioning of the [[symbolic ]] [[order]], in which [[the symbolic ]] mask-mandate matters more than the direct [[reality ]] of the [[individual ]] who wears this mask and/or assumes this mandate. This functioning involves the [[structure ]] of [[fetishist ]] [[disavowal]]: "I [[know ]] very well that things are the way I see [[them ]] /that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him". So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes, i.e. I believe in [[Another ]] [[Space ]] (the [[domain ]] of pure symbolic [[authority]]) which matters more than the reality of its spokesmen. The cynical reduction to reality thus falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more [[truth ]] in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge - if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. This [[paradox ]] is what [[Lacan ]] aims at with his <i>[[les non-dupes errent]]</i>: those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic [[deception]]/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.<br><br>

What a cynic who "believes only his eyes" misses is the efficiency of the symbolic [[fiction]], the way this fiction [[structures ]] our [[experience ]] of reality. The same gap is at [[work ]] in our most intimate [[relationship ]] to our neighbors: we behave AS IF we do not know that they also smell badly, secrete excrement, etc. - a minimum of [[idealization]], of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis of our co-[[existence]]. And doesn't the same disavowal account for the [[sublime ]] beauty of the idealizing gesture discernible from Anna Frank to American Communists who believed in the [[Soviet Union]]? Although we know that Stalinist [[Communism ]] was an appalling [[thing]], we nonetheless admire the victims of the McCarthy witch hunt who heroically persisted in their belief in Communism and support for the Soviet Union.<br><br>

The logic is here the same as that of [[Anne Frank ]] who, in her diaries, expresses belief in the ultimate goodness of man in spite of the horrors accomplished by men against [[Jews ]] in [[World ]] War II: what renders such an assertion of belief (in the essential goodness of Man; in the truly [[human ]] [[character ]] of the Soviet [[regime]]) sublime, is the very gap between it and the overwhelming factual evidence against it, i.e. the [[active ]] will to [[disavow ]] the actual [[state ]] of things. Perhaps therein resides the most elementary meta-[[physical ]] gesture: in this [[refusal ]] to accept the [[real ]] in its idiocy, to disavow it and to [[search ]] for Another World behind it. The big [[Other ]] is thus the order of lie, of lying sincerely. And it is in this sense that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity": even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence, their full engagement in the symbolic [[ritual]], while "the worst," the mob, engage in (racist, [[religious]], sexist...) fanaticism? Is this opposition not a [[good ]] description of today's [[split ]] between tolerant but anemic [[liberals]], and the fundamentalists full of "passionate intensity"?<br><br>

[[Niels Bohr]], who gave the right answer to [[Einstein]]'s "God doesn't play dice" ("Don't tell God what to do!"), also provided the perfect example of how such a fetishist disavowal of belief works in [[ideology]]: [[seeing ]] a horse-shoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn't believe in the [[superstition ]] that it brings luck, to what Bohr snapped back: "I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!" What this paradox renders clear is the way a belief is a reflexive attitude: it is never a [[case ]] of simply believing - one has to believe in belief itself. Which is why [[Kierkegaard ]] was right to [[claim ]] that we do not really believe (in [[Christ]]), we just believe to believe - and Bohr just confronts us with the [[logical ]] [[negative ]] of this reflexivity (one can also NOT believe one's beliefs...). <tt><a [[name]]="1x"></a><a href="#1">1</a></tt><br><br>

At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meet [[Pascal]]: "Fake it until you make it.." However, this [[causality ]] of the habit is more [[complex ]] than it may appear: far from offering an explanation of how beliefs emerge, it itself calls for an explanation. The first thing to specify is that Pascal's "Kneel down and you will believe!" has to be [[understood ]] as involving a kind of [[self]]-referential causality: "Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!" The second thing is that, in the "normal" cynical functioning of ideology, belief is [[displaced ]] onto another, onto a "[[subject ]] supposed to believe," so that the [[true ]] logic is: "Kneel down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE!" One has to take this literally and even risk a kind of [[inversion ]] of Pascal's [[formula]]: "You believe too much, too directly? You find your belief too oppressing in its raw immediacy? Then kneel down, act as if you believe, and YOU WILL GET RID OF YOUR BELIEF - you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-sist objectified in your act of praying!" That is to say, what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one's own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one's belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? To believe - to believe "directly," without the externalizing mediation of a ritual - is a heavy, oppressing, [[traumatic ]] burden, which, through exerting a ritual, one has a [[chance ]] of transferring it onto an Other...<br><br>

When [[Badiou ]] emphasizes that [[double ]] [[negation ]] is not the same as [[affirmation]], he thereby merely confirms the old [[Hegelian ]] motto <i>les non-dupes errent</i>. Let us take the affirmation "I believe." Its negation is: "I do not really believe, I just fake to believe." However, its properly Hegelian negation of negation is not the [[return ]] to direct belief, but the [[self-relating ]] fake: "I fake to fake to believe," which means: "I really believe without [[being ]] aware of it." Is, then, irony not the ultimate [[form ]] of the critique of ideology today - irony in the precise Mozartean sense of taking the statements more seriously than the [[subjects ]] who utter them themselves?<br><br>

In the case of so-called "fundamentalists," this "normal" functioning of ideology in which the [[ideological ]] belief is transposed onto the Other is disturbed by the violent return of the immediate belief - they "really believe it." The first consequence of this is that the fundamentalist becomes the dupe of his [[fantasy ]] (as Lacan put it apropos Marquis de [[Sade]]), immediately [[identifying ]] himself with it. From my own youth, I [[remember ]] a fantasy concerning the origin of [[children]]: after I learned how children are made, I still had no precise [[idea ]] on insemination, so I [[thought ]] one has to make love every day for the [[whole ]] nine months: in [[woman]]'s belly, the [[child ]] is gradually formed through sperm - each ejaculation is like adding an additional brick... One plays with such [[fantasies]], not "taking them seriously," it is in this way that they fulfill their function - and the fundamentalist [[lacks ]] this minimal distance towards his fantasy.<br><br>

Let us clarify this point apropos Elfriede Jelinek's <i>The Piano Teacher</i>, which can also be read as the story of a [[psychotic ]] who lacks the coordinates of the fantasy which would allow her to organize her [[desire]]: when, in the middle of the [[film]], she goes to a video cabin and watches a hardcore porn, she does it in order simply to learn what to do, how to engage in sex, and, in her [[letter ]] to her prospective lover, she basically puts on paper what she saw there... (Her [[psychosis ]] and lack of [[fantasmatic ]] coordinates are clearly signalled in her strange relationship with her [[mother ]] - when, in the middle of the night, she embraces her and starts to kiss her, this displays her [[total ]] lack of the [[desiring ]] coordinates that would direct her towards a determinate [[object ]] - as well as her self-cutting of her vagina with a razor, an act destined to bring her to reality.) <tt><a name="2x"></a><a href="#2">2</a></tt> At the very end of <i>The Piano Teacher</i>, the heroine, after stabbing herself, walks away (from the concert hall where she saw the last [[time ]] her young lover) - what if this self-inflicted wound is to be conceived as "[[traversing ]] the fantasy"? What if, through striking at herself, she got rid of the hold of the masochistic fantasy over herself? In short, what if the ending is "optimistic": after being raped by her lover, after she got her fantasy back at her in reality, this traumatic experience enables her to leave it behind? Furthermore, what if the fantasy she puts on the paper she gives to her lover is HIS OWN fantasy of what he really would really like to do to her, so that he is disgusted precisely because he gets from her DIRECTLY his own fantasy?<br><br>

More generally, when one is passionately in love and, after not seeing the [[beloved ]] for a long time, asks her for a photo to keep in [[mind ]] her features, the true aim of this [[request ]] is not to check if the properties of the beloved still fits the criteria of my live, but, on the contrary, to learn (again) what these criteria are. I am in love absolutely, and the photo a priori CANNOT be a disappointment - I [[need ]] it just so that it will tell me WHAT I love... What this means is that true love is [[performative ]] in the sense that it CHANGES its object - not in the sense of idealization, but in the sense of opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object's positive properties and the <i>[[agalma]]</i>, the mysterious core of the beloved (which is why I do not love you because of your properties which are worthy of love: on the contrary, it is only because of my love for you that your features appear to me as worthy of love). It is for this [[reason ]] that finding oneself in the [[position ]] of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Everyone [[knows ]] Lacan's definition of love ("Love is giving something one doesn't have..."); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the [[sentence]]: "... to someone who doesn't [[want ]] it." And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us - is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something [[obscene]], intrusive, is being [[forced ]] upon us?<br><br>

In a kind of Hegelian twist, love does not simply open itself up for the unfathomable abyss in the beloved object; what is in the beloved "more than him/herself," the presupposed [[excess ]] of/in the beloved, is reflexively posited by love itself. Which is why true love is far from the [[openness ]] to the "transcendent mystery of the beloved Other": true love is well aware that, as [[Hegel ]] would have put it, the excess of the beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very [[place ]] of the inscription of my own desire into the beloved object - transcendence is the form of [[appearance ]] of immanence. As the melodramatic wisdom puts it, it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.<br><br>

Let us return to our fundamentalist: the obverse of his turning into a dupe of his fantasy is that he loses his sensitivity for the enigma of the Other's desire. In a [[recent ]] case of [[analytic ]] [[treatment ]] in UK, the [[patient]], a woman who was a [[victim ]] of rape, remained deeply disturbed by an unexpected gesture of the rapist: after already brutally enforcing her surrender, and just prior to penetrating her, he withdraw a little bit, politely said "Just a minute, lady!" and put on a condom. This weird intrusion of politeness into a brutal [[situation ]] perplexed the victim: what was its [[meaning]]? Was it a strange care for her, or a simple egotistic protective measure from the part of the rapist (making it sure that he will not get AIDS from her, and not the other way round). This gesture, much more than explosions of raw [[passion]], stands for the [[encounter ]] of the "enigmatic [[signifier]]," of the desire of the Other in all its impenetrability. Does such an encounter of the Other's desire follow the logic of [[alienation ]] or that of [[separation]]? It can be an experience of utter alienation (I am obsessed with the inaccessible obscure impenetrable divine Desire which plays [[games ]] with me, as in the Jansenist dieu obscur); however, the key shift occurs when, in a Hegelian way, we gain insight into how "the secrets of the Egyptians were also [[secret ]] for the Egyptians themselves," i.e., into how our alienation FROM the Other is already the alienation OF the Other (from) itself - it is this redoubled alienation that generates what Lacan called separation as the overlapping of the two lacks.<br><br>

And the link between these two features of the fundamentalist's position is clear: since fantasy is a scenario the subject builds in order to answer the enigma of the Other's [[desire, ]] i.e., since fantasy provides an answer to "What does the Other want from me?", the immediate [[identification ]] with the fantasy as it were closes up the gap - the enigma is clarified, we fully know the answer...<br><br>

When theologians try to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of [[shoah]], their answers build a strange succession of Hegelian triads. First, those who want to leave divine [[sovereignty ]] unimpaired and thus have to attribute to God full [[responsibility ]] for <i>shoah</i>, first offer (1) the "legalistic" sin-and-[[punishment ]] [[theory ]] (<i>shoah</i> has to be a punishment for the [[past ]] sins of humanity-or Jews themselves); then, they [[pass ]] (2) to the "[[moralistic]]" character-education theory (<i>shoah</i> is to be understood along the lines of the story of Job, as the most radical [[test ]] of our [[faith ]] in God - if we survive this ordeal, our character will stand firm...); and, finally, they take refuge in a kind of "infinite judgement" which should save the day after all common measure between <i>shoah</i> and its meaning breaks down, and (3) the divine mystery theory (facts like <i>shoah</i> bear [[witness ]] to the unfathomable abyss of divine will). In accordance with the Hegelian motto of a redoubled mystery (the mystery God is for us has to be also a mystery for God Himself), the truth of this "infinite judgement" can only be to deny God's full sovereignty and omnipotence.<br><br>

The next [[triad ]] is thus composed of those who, unable to combine <i>shoah</i> with God's omnipotence (how could He have allowed it to happen?), opt for some form of divine limitation: (1) first, God is directly posited as finite (not all-encompassing, overwhelmed by the dense inertia of his own creation); (2) then, this limitation is reflected back into God himself as his free act - God is self-limited (He voluntarily constrained his [[power ]] in order to leave the space open for human [[freedom]]); (3) finally, the self-limitation is externalized, the two moments are posited as [[autonomous ]] - God is embattled (the dualistic solution: there is a counter-force or [[principle ]] of demoniac [[Evil ]] active in the world). However, it is only here that we encounter the core of the problem of the origin of Evil.<br><br>

The standard metaphysical-religious [[notion ]] of Evil is that of doubling, gaining a distance, abandoning the reference to the [[big Other]], our Origin and [[Goal]], turning away from the original divine One, getting caught into the self-referential egotistic loop, thus introducing a gap into the [[global ]] [[balance ]] and [[harmony ]] of the One-All. The easy, all too slick, [[postmodern ]] solution to this is to retort that the way out of this self-incurred [[impasse ]] consists in abandoning the very presupposition of the primordial One from which one turned away, i.e., to accept that our primordial situation is that of finding oneself in a complex situation, one within a [[multitude ]] of foreign elements-only the theologico-metaphysical presupposition of the original One compels us to perceive the [[alien ]] as the outcome of (our) alienation. From this perspective, the Evil is not the redoubling of the primordial One, turning away from it, but the very imposition of an all-encompassing One onto the primordial dispersal. However, what if the true task of thought is to [[think ]] the self-[[division ]] of the One, to think the One itself as split within itself, as involving an inherent gap?<br><br>

The very gap between gnosticism and [[monotheism ]] can thus be accounted for in the [[terms ]] of the origin of evil: while gnosticism locates the primordial [[duality ]] of Good and Evil into God himself (the [[material ]] [[universe ]] into which we are fallen is the creation of an evil and/or stupid divinity, and what gives us hope is the good divinity which keeps alive the promise of another reality, our true home), monotheism saves [[unity ]] (one-ness) of a good God by locating the origin of evil into our freedom (evil is either [[finitude ]] as such, the inertia of material reality, or the spiritual act of willfully turning away from God). It is easy to bring the two together by claiming that the Gnostic duality of God is merely a "reflexive determination" of our own changed attitude towards God: what we perceive as two Gods is effectively the split in our [[nature]], in our relating to God. However, the true task is to locate the source of the split between good and evil into God himself while remaining within the field of monotheism - the task which tried to accomplish [[German ]] mystics (Jakob Boehme) and later [[philosophers ]] who took over their problematic ([[Schelling]], Hegel). In other words, the task is to transpose the human "[[external ]] [[reflection]]" which enacts the split between good and evil back into the One God himself.<br><br>

Back to the topic of <i>shoah</i>, this brings us to the [[third ]] position above and beyond the first two (the sovereign God, the finite God), that of a [[suffering ]] God: not a triumphalist God who always wins at the end, although "his ways are mysterious," since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who - like the suffering Christ on the Cross - is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in [[solidarity ]] with the human misery. It was already Schelling who wrote: "God is a [[life]], not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. /.../ Without the [[concept ]] of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of [[history ]] remains incomprehensible." Why? Because God's suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent [[Master ]] pulling the strings from above: God's suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real [[struggle]], the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the [[philosophical ]] background of Dietrich Bonhoffer's deep insight that, after <i>shoah</i>, "only a suffering God can [[help ]] us now" - a proper [[supplement ]] to [[Heidegger]]'s "Only a God can still save us!" from his last interview. One should therefore take the [[statement ]] that "the unspeakable suffering of the six millions is also the [[voice ]] of the suffering of God" quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any "normal" human measure makes it divine. Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Juergen [[Habermas]]: "Secular [[languages ]] which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost." Which is why the secular-[[humanist ]] reactions to phenomena like <i>shoah</i> or <i>[[gulag]]</i> (AND [[others]]) is experienced as insufficient: in order to be at the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic [[perversion ]] or catastrophe in which the world itself is "out of joint." Therein resides the paradox of the theological [[significance ]] of <i>shoah</i>: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to [[theology ]] (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a [[horror ]] to take place?), it is at the same time only theology which can provide the [[frame ]] enabling us to somehow approach the scope of this catastrophe - the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of GOD.

1. It is still fashionable today to mock the [[Freudian ]] notion of [[phallus ]] by ironically discerning everywhere "[[phallic ]] [[symbols]]" - for example, when a story mentions a strong, forward-thrusting movement, this is supposed to stand for "phallic penetration"; or, when the building is a high tower, it is obviously "phallic," etc. One cannot but notice how those who make such comments never fully [[identify ]] with them - they either impute such a belief into "phallic symbols everywhere" to some [[mythical ]] orthodox Freudian, or they themselves endorse the phallic meaning, but as something to be criticized, to be overcome. The irony of the situation is that the naïve orthodox Freudian who sees "phallic symbols everywhere" does not [[exist]], that he is a fiction of the critic himself, his "subject supposed to believe." The only believer in the phallic symbols is in both cases the critic himself, who believes through the other, i.e., who "projects" (or, rather, transposes) his belief onto the fictive other.<br>

* [[With or Without Passion|With or Without Passion - What's Wrong with Fundamentalism? I]]. ''[[Lacan.com]]''. November 13, 2005. <http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm>.